Arachnid Player for Macintosh (and Power Macintosh)
Arachnid º 0.5 ReadMe
Arachnid Player is COPYRIGHTED by the University of Iowa.
Welcome to the Beta 1.5.7 release of Arachnid and beta 0.5 of Arachnid Player. The final release version of Arachnid is now expected sometime in late August.
An incompatibility has been identified; on PowerMacs running RamDoubler, the linking to GIF image files will regularly cause the machine to hang up. Usually you can force quit application using the keystroke combination of Shift-Option-Escape. A fully native version of Arachnid should be available in the next 2 weeks, hopefully this will help solve this problem.
Because Arachnid contains built in support for multimedia playback of formats such as Audio AIFF, QuickTime MOV, and PICT, JPEG, and GIF images files, Arachnid Active Mode functions in a manner similar to a more traditional authoring tool. If you are building a project whose links are primarily to pages within the project and locally stored multimedia files, you can use Arachnid Player to distribute your project, WITHOUT converting it HTML.
In other words, the Arachnid Player allows you to distribute your project and media via disk or CD-ROM. As long as you include your media files with your project, virtually all interactive behavior can be experienced, without the use of a Browser or Helper applications.
Like Arachnid itself, Arachnid Player is Freeware and can be given to anyone. You can distribute as many copies of your project and the Arachnid Player as you like. If you wish to distribute an Arachnid project commercially, you will need to make licensing arrangements with the three third party developers whose XCMDs are used in Arachnid. The About Arachnid or About Arachnid Player Info dialog boxes list these developers.
The startup sequence in the Arachnid Player has been fixed. It requires that a project always be open to run, so it will prompt you to select a project if one is not already open and quit if you fail to open a project. Using the Arachnid Player, an Arachnid project and associated multimedia files can be distributed on disk or CD in addition to exporting to HTML for use on the Internet.
Thanks for you interest in Arachnid. Again, please remember that it is Beta software and will have some problems. We welcome any comments, feedback, problems, or ideas that you might have.
Subsequent versions of Arachnid can be accessed through the internet by opening a connection from your Browser to "http://sec-look.uiowa.edu/" or "http://sec-look.weeg.uiowa.edu/". There is a link on our Home Page to a page containing information on Arachnid and other projects we have developed or are currently developing.
Please direct all comments suggestions and bug reports to:
